Vera Conrad was a young woman expecting her first child with great anticipation when World War Two broke out in 1939. Two weeks later, her infant son was born, and six weeks after that, her husband was mobilized for the German war effort. Conrad had begun keeping a diary as a baby book for her child and diligently wrote about family life, their farm, and the war until the end of 1943. Two days before Christmas, she was notified that her husband Joachim was missing in action on the Eastern Front. The rest of the diary, which ends in 1948, was devoted to Joachim, at first keeping a chronicle of life on the home front for him to read upon his return, and as hope dimmed and the war worsened, as a repository for Conrad’s feelings of anxiety, fear, loss, frustration, and grief.
Vera’s diary presents a devastating account of everyday life during World War Two under National Socialism. The uncertainty about her husband’s whereabouts pulled Vera between hope and grief as she willed him to be alive and feared the worst. The challenges and problems she faced were common to other women in Germany: she managed the daily operation of the farm and supervised the foreign workers and apprentices working on it; she raised her children and kept them safe from bombing attacks. Joachim’s absence and the lack of information about him meant that she also mourned, deeply and from despair like millions of other German women. Vera’s viewpoint as a rural inhabitant offers a valuable contrast to the more common urban narrative and the fact that she wrote until 1948 also bridges a standard historiographical divide and allows the reader to learn about the occupation and reconstruction of East Germany under Soviet auspices.
My work narrates Vera Conrad’s war experience while focusing on how she coped with loss and her process of bereavement. I quote generously from the diary itself, provide historical context, and discuss characteristics of bereavement, in particular of “ambiguous loss.” Like all societies, mid-twentieth century Germany had strong codes and strictures regarding the expression of emotion, in particular sadness and grief: they were to be suppressed or transfigured into pride at the sacrifice one had made for the nation. Vera’s dramatic range of responses and emotions was exhausting for her as well as challenging, because she wanted to adhere to the emotional status quo. The “little book” became a testament to her emotional struggle to take care of herself—preserve her sanity and energy—and adhere to National Socialist emotional strictures. Despite her busy life, Vera took the time to write several times a week, indicating its high value for her. She was serving not only as a witness, but was also acting as her own therapist and grief counselor. As Vera wrote down her experiences and emotions, she left a physical impression and the book became a feedback loop, recording and revanimating her emotions, particularly her longing for her husband. Her struggle to live up to her own ideal of a German woman, wife, and mother is both touching and agonizing. Vera’s diary demonstrates that women used self-expression and emotional management very intentionally as a coping strategy to help them handle stress, trauma and grief.
I wrote this book out of a search to find German war widows’ subjective experiences about the war, particularly about their grief. The topic has been addressed from policy perspectives, so voices of bureaucrats, pastors and social workers are common. But the raw, unmediated effects of war on those who bear its burdens are more difficult to access. Scholars have frequently claimed that twentieth-century war presented an upheaval in mourning practices and a crisis of meaning because of the unprecedented manner and numbers of deaths, that these left the bereaved without language to express themselves. Another claim by scholars and archivists is that women had been too busy during the war to take the time to write. I searched in several German and American archives, looking for documents in widows’ own voices. However, at the Kempowski archive in Berlin, I struck gold: most of Vera Conrad’s wartime diary was submitted by her daughter to the archive. I was able to supplement the archive’s copy of the diary with a substantial sheaf of supplemental pages from the diary, photographs, the local church record book, letters from the Red Cross search service, and other family documents via my visits to Conrad’s son and daughter, whose interviews provided me important new material and background for the story. With this book, I contribute to the burgeoning conversation about loss, grief, and family life in war.
Historything 